Seoirse Bulfin would often joke with Davy Fitzgerald about his superior head-to-head record in management against Brian Cody.
The ‘one’ referred to was that epic Wexford Leinster semi-final win over Kilkenny in Wexford Park in June 2017, a night of nights for the locals after 13 years of repetitive punishment beatings since their previous championship win over their provincial oppressors in 2004.
But the liberation as the Wexford faithful flooded the pitch after their 1-20 to 3-11 win was palpable.
Banished to the stand because of a misdemeanour in a league semi-final with Tipperary that earned him a two-month ban, Davy Fitzgerald watched it all unfold from a specially constructed glass box adjacent to the press area.
That night it felt like a stationary Popemobile and at the game’s conclusion its chief inhabitant was encouraged by some of the local media to climb on to a chair and acknowledge an adoring crowd below. He did. And the place went wild below him.
“I take all the credit for that one, I keep telling Davy that,” laughs Bulfin now, one of the voices on the sideline directing matters in Fitzgerald’s absence.
A Leinster title in 2019 will always be the highlight. But maybe Fitzgerald’s most enduring legacy was their turnaround against Kilkenny in those five years.
Perhaps it would have happened anyway, the natural cycle of things. The 2016 All-Ireland final defeat to Tipperary put Cody and Kilkenny on a quicker-than-expected development path. It forced them to look a little differently.
And at the same time, Wexford had players graduating who, under JJ Doyle’s stewardship, had won three successive Leinster U-21 titles, beating Kilkenny each time.
Doyle was now part of Fitzgerald’s management and all these elements combined and helped up to cook up a perfect storm for Kilkenny.
From 2017 to 2021 they played 14 times in three different competitions – championship, league and Walsh Cup.
For Wexford, eight wins and a draw represented some transformation when pitched against the trauma of how it was in the aftermath of that smash and grab win in the 2004 Leinster semi-final.
Wexford paid a price for that late Michael Jacob steal in Croke Park that left Cody dropping to his knees behind the Davin End goal.
In those 13 years there were 16 meetings between them, seven in championship, another five in league and four Walsh Cup head-to-heads where only once, in 2013, Wexford got some respite.
The rest, especially in championship, had a recurring theme: Kilkenny dishing it out with little mercy.
But one of Fitzgerald’s biggest investments was to rewire the thinking towards their biggest rivals.
For Bulfin, sidekick through college (LIT) and Clare years, it was an eye-opener to see the rivalry that truly existed in that part of the country.
“Coming from Munster, we all have a bit of an aristocratic attitude but I loved it, phenomenal hurling, different type of hurling and those Saturday evening games between ourselves and Kilkenny, they were fantastic.
“It’s only when you go down there you see how sharp the rivalry is. It would be like east Limerick and Tipp or where I am in Limerick (Bruff) and Cork.
“It was only after a couple of years that you realise the rivalries that are there. How important it was to make the breakthrough because they were, maybe downtrodden is too strong a word. But it was certainly painful.
“And there was a sense that ‘enough was enough’, they couldn’t be accepting those sort of beatings so players made a collective decision that they were going to do what they were going to do, they were going to work and see where it would get them.”
The shift in the dynamic began early in their reign when they pitched up to New Ross for a Walsh Cup game. Kilkenny won narrowly but there was no mistaking the edge there was to Wexford, even for a pre-season game, and that carried through the league and into a quarter-final in Nowlan Park.
Bulfin recalls sitting beside the former Kilkenny goalkeeper PJ Ryan, a member of the backroom, as they approached the venue that afternoon and detecting a “giddy” mood among their players that he didn’t like.
“Normally it gets very quiet and there is a bit of tension there. Myself and PJ were looking at each other and saying, ‘We could be in trouble here’ The Wexford lads were exceptionally relaxed and chatty.
“But different teams handle things differently. At that stage you could just see they had blossomed. The belief that was there.
“Regardless of losing to Tipperary in the semi-final, for Wexford to turn over Kilkenny in a competitive match like that, it was a huge lift to them. You could see the body language, that anything was possible.”
Certain of a backlash, Bulfin wondered whether they might have been better coming up just short that afternoon, rather than poking the bear for their subsequent championship meeting two months later.
“You achieved a lot in a short space of time in the first year but you knew Kilkenny were gunning for you coming to Wexford Park after beating them in the league.
“Part of me was saying would we have been better off to have run them close in the league and then, for want of a better word, ‘ambush’ them. But I think after the league quarter-final, that sense of trying to catch them in a one-off game, it dissipated. All of a sudden that fear factor was gone.”
When they repeated it again in a Walsh Cup final the following winter, ‘winning’ a free shoot-out to determine winners of the day after it had been drawn, the sequence extended to three.
A subsequent league semi-final in Wexford Park, drawing over 16,000 spectators on Easter Sunday, was the only one that ‘got away,’ as Kilkenny racked up a nine-point win.
Every other game, in normal time, had little more than a score between them.
“If you were looking at the previous four or five years and were looking at Kilkenny as the benchmark, there was an understated feeling that if you could be competitive with Kilkenny, well then the belief the Wexford lads could get from that would lift to another level. And it did.”
Bulfin credits Doyle’s work as U-21 manager for much of it. “A lot of them didn’t have the same baggage as some of the older guys coming to the end of their time had with Kilkenny but ultimately you still had to get over them at senior level to get over that hump.
And when they did, they squeezed more out of it. At one stage between 2019 and 2020, Kilkenny went six games without winning one, incorporating the drawn Leinster Championship group game and final.
Bulfin wonders now why, despite being held to a draw in Mullingar by Westmeath last weekend and all the bad vibes that go with a result like that, Wexford shouldn’t take some encouragement from those previous five years against Kilkenny.
Even last year, it took extra-time to divide them after an absorbing battle with Kilkenny required a Hawk-Eye intervention to detect a point that had dipped just over Eoin Murphy’s crossbar before Conor McDonald had bundled in a goal, subsequently disallowed.
“I know home advantage swings a lot of games, across all sports, these days but after last weekend, they couldn’t ask for better opposition to get them back on track,” he figures.
The recent record, at least, dictates that.
